Room by Room

It took John Ashbery over a decade to decorate all fourteen rooms of the Hudson house. During these years, Ashbery and David Kermani spent many weekends hunting in antique shops throughout upstate New York and moving furniture from room to room as he found new pieces. By the early 1990s, the house felt complete, though Ashbery continued to play with the arrangement of smaller collections and the placement of some objects and paintings.

Victorian houses were traditionally designed to stage a grand entrance or exit. Owners demanded large and impressive center halls and often decorated them lavishly, for the room was the one private space that all social classes were guaranteed to see.

Ashbery’s center hall both aspires to and parodies this model. The beautiful architecturally designed interior—rich wooden beams, high ceilings, elaborate fireplace, dim overhead lights and a mirror—creates a dark, gloomy and enveloping mood. Ashbery adds small touches to enhance this feeling, including a regal umbrella stand, a flowery sewing table by the door, elaborate candelabras on the mantel, handsome Chinese Chippendale furniture and Hiroshige and Hokusai images on the walls. The visitor immediately feels in the presence of a slightly mysterious, well-traveled home owner.

Opening the door into the hall, however, the visitor sees something truly unexpected. The very first sight as the inner door opens—because of the angle of entry—is actually the bright, violent painting of an assassination scene above the couch in the music room. This sudden spectacle, which contrasts sharply with the warmth and cozy gloom of the center hall, leaves a lingering sensation.

The music room is the brightest, most spacious and sophisticated room in the house. With its his high ceilings, grand piano and large works of art (a rotating series of pieces by Willem de Kooning, Alex Katz, Lynn Davis, Fairfield Porter, Susan Daykin, Jean Helion and Trevor Winkfield), the space is designed to impress a first-time guest.

This intimate, shadowy sitting room to the right of the center hall seats four. Large, comfortable upholstered chairs draped with antimacassars take up most of the small space. Yet the display of ceramics, the modest collection of Piranesi and Edward Lear prints, and several whimsically overgrown plants remind one of other places and other times, perhaps a romantic stop in Italy one evening during a European grand tour some time long ago.

The elaborate carved wooden table and chairs were made for the home in The 1890s and have never been moved. In the early 2000s John Ashbery began to use the table for collage-making, and his materials now cover every surface.

The passageway between the dining room and the kitchen. On one side are cabinets full of dishware. On the other side, above a copper sink, five dollar antique store finds hang on the William Morris wallpaper next to original Rudy Burkhardt prints. Next to the sink is a collection of bottles of gin, wine and other alcohol, including many unopened bottles, gifts gathered over many years.

A rectangular room with a tin ceiling, the kitchen still has its original stove (though Ashbery never used it). There are several small collections, including cookie jars atop the refrigerator and copper fish molds on the walls. One pantry houses Ashbery’s large collection of cookbooks. The second pantry is full of dishware.

The sitting room is the most used room upstairs. It has two couches, two coffee tables and many small paintings by several of John Ashbery’s closest painter-friends offer guests an alternative, much more casual space than the music room to chat and drink.

The “Bay Room,” conceived of in the original blueprints as a “Sewing Room,” is above the center hall and looks out over the green. One of the brightest and smallest spaces in the house, it includes Ashbery’s grandfather’s handsome desk and connects the upstairs sitting room to the Yellow Room.